It is entirely possible that Dustin and Rebecca Heath named their little girl "Emerline." People have been giving their children strange names forever and will continue to do so forever. Yet, I think it's more likely that her name was Emeline and that this is another Annar/Susannar/Marther situation.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

I went out with my camera today to take advantage of the fantastic weather. I decided to go up to Amesbury, where I found the Union Cemetery on Route 110 in complete disarray. The storms of the past week have downed at least 6 full-sized trees and many smaller branches. As far as I could tell, only a few monuments were broken, but the trees are huge and there may have been more crushed stones that I couldn't see. Most of the damage is in the 19th-century section — the 18th-century stones were largely untouched. I saw at least one City of Amesbury truck in the cemetery, so I imagine that they're on top of the situation.

I watched the first episode of The Pacific with my parents last night and was actually a bit disappointed.

Of course, I understand that it's not supposed to be Band of Brothers: West Coast, but I thought that the first half hour was a muddle. The boot camp episode in BoB introduced all of the characters and established them in time and space, but the first half of this first episode jumped among its 3? 4? main characters in a way that was hard to follow. Instead of introducing one, then another, then another, it switched scenes between Curly and Italian Guy, then introduced Southern Boy, and then, all of a sudden, we were at Guadalcanal with Curly 9 months later.

Maybe it's just that I have a hard time distinguishing between young white guys who are all dressed the same. I suppose they must have mentioned these characters' names at least once during the episode, but I've watched it twice and can't catch them (Curly introduces himself to a girl at the beginning, but his name is not repeated). I looked them up on IMDb, but having appearance-derived nicknames helps me keep them straight. I gather that Southern Boy is from the South because of his family's accents and that Curly is from the Northeast somewhere because the bus depot had a bus leaving for New York, but I have no idea about Italian Guy — Chicago? New York? No idea.

The battle scenes on Guadalcanal were harrowing, but, again, hard to follow. Some of that is intentional — confusion is an important part of the feeling for these scenes — but some was not. Who were those tortured dead guys in the jungle? American paratroopers? Fighter pilots? Australians? And how did Italian Guy's regiment get to Guadalcanal at the end of the episode? Did the American Navy fight its way through after we saw it get run off to sea? How long was Curly's unit on the island? We saw maybe two nights, but then they were all ragged and had week-old sores, so a month maybe? Some of this might heighten an authentic sense of experiencing random events with little understanding of the bigger picture, but it was not very satisfying as a narrative.

I think that the producers recognize that Americans know less about the war in the Pacific than the war in Europe, but I don't think that they make many concessions to that lack of knowledge. It's hard to know what's going on in the battles without going online and reading some background info (which I did between my 1st and 2nd viewings). A few well-placed lines like, "The Japanese are going to attack us from the sea," or "I'm glad our Navy was able to come back and drive off those Japanese ships that just sunk all our ships 5 minutes ago" would have gone a long way to making things clearer.

I was pretty excited to watch The Pacific — my Papa fought in the Pacific theatre, though not on the islands (he was in China-Burma-India, flying supply runs over the Himalayas). I'll probably keep watching, especially now that I've gone and read all of the auxiliary material that explains who all the characters are. I will reserve final judgment until I've seen more, but I thought that episode 1 was an inauspicious start.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

If you have a Blogger blog, you can customize your template by going to Blogger in Draft, clicking on "Layout," and selecting the "Template Designer" option. Then, you can play with templates, colors, backgrounds, and fonts.

I will be fiddling around with VPI's template over the next day or two, trying to find something I like. I liked Scribe well enough, but every history blogger used it and it was too narrow, so I'm excited about getting something new.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

CNN has an article up today focusing on a blogger's recent challenge to her readers to eat "real food" for a whole month. Participants committed to avoiding all processed foods, including white flour, sugar, refined oils, and low- or non-fat milk, for 28 days.

There are several interesting things about this article, but the one that really caught my eye was the use of the word "traditional" to describe the foods prepared during this challenge. Though the CNN article does not really elaborate on what "traditional" meant, other websites have lengthy descriptions:

What are Traditional Foods? The traditional food movement focuses on real, whole foods: foods that our ancestors ate. The main deviation from the standard American diet can be found in the attitude towards fat and carbohydrates. Generally, traditional foodists eat fewer carbohydrates (particularly in grains and sugars) than most Americans and don't feel it necessary to limit their fat intake. A typical day for someone who eats according to traditional foods may start with eggs, bacon, and some fruit, followed by meats, cheeses, fruits and vegetables for lunch and dinner. If grains are eaten, they're generally soaked to neutralize anti-nutrients called phytates contained in raw grain products. Meats are generally grass fed, and dairy products are eaten raw: that is, not pasteurized. Processed foods, soy, trans fats, white flour products, and factory farmed meat and dairy products are generally avoided.

I'm trying to imagine an era in which anyone's "ancestors" ate cheese, but not grain, and I've got nothing.*

If you use Blogger, you can now caption photos! Just make sure you are using draft.blogger.com, then upload your photo. After it appears in the post, click on it and select "Add Caption." The caption will move with your photo if you resize the photo or change the alignment.

On Saturday, the visitor's center at the African Burial Ground National Monument opened in Lower Manhattan. The museum and memorial mark the location of a graveyard used by New York's enslaved and free black communities between 1690 and 1790. In the 1990s, construction uncovered more than 400 bodies, which have been catalogued, studied, and reburied beneath the new monument.

The New York Times has a lengthy review of the new museum. The author, Edward Rothstein, is a bit skeptical of some of the exhibits' politics and questions whether the conclusions on display are supported by the evidence. I haven't visited yet, so I can't really speak to his specific criticisms, but I know that it can be very tempting to over-interpret evidence in graveyards. Still, I wish that Rothstein had interviewed some of the attendees about what the memorial meant to them. As he notes in the first sentence of his review, "Cemeteries are at least as much for the living as the dead." That's very true, and I do not necessarily think that that is a bad thing. It is the main contention of my dissertation that colonial American graveyards were political spaces from the first, so it is unsurprising that they still are today.

I'm not a great lover of New York (too big for me), but I'm excited about visiting this memorial. Wouldn't it be great if we could get a visitor's center for God's Little Acre in Newport?

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Please feel free to use any of my gravestone pics for educational purposes. If you want to repost them on your own blog or website, all I ask is that you give me credit and a link! If you'd like to use them for any other purpose, please email me for permission.